The spread of opinions in a model with different topologies

Understanding how new opinions spread through a community or how consensus emerges in noisy environments can have a significant impact in our comprehension of the social relations among individuals. In this work a new model for the dynamics of opinion formation is introduced. The model is based on a non-linear interaction between neighbor agents in a community, and has the possibility of including a stochastic variable to account for the effect of noise in the way the agents communicate. Our results show that by increasing the intensity of noise, the system goes from consensus to a disordered state. Depending on the number of competing opinions and the details of the network of interactions, the system displays a first or a second order transition. We present results for 1d lattices, annealed, and complex networks. Our results indicate that the system dynamics is similar in any complex network as well as in the annealed network.

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